UPDATE: 2nd March 2010: Please note, this article (posted approximately 6 months ago) is still current and we continue to receive notifications regarding letters being sent to registrants of the below nature. We recommend our Resellers to post a similar notice on their websites to prevent their end users from being scammed by this group.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
Netregistry was recently made aware of the latest domain renewal scam which is coming to registrants postal addresses from a “Domain Renewal Group” company in the US.
The letter sent to registrants appears as a legitimate renewal reminder notification, which registrants often do not read and simply pay, which results in website and email downtime when the domain is not renewed as per the notice.
This is a fairly standard renewal scam, where the perpetrator had illegally searched and harvested the publicly available Whois database of the .com Registry and used the information to contact the registrants in the hope that they will pay without reading the notice.
Please be aware the notice requests renewal and authorisation to transfer the domain registration away from your current Registrar (e.g. Netregistry) to Domain Renewal Group. However there is no information or fields for transferring the domain registration with this notice. Therefore this company is collecting registrant’s funds without the ability to process the renewal.
For a copy of what the notice looks like, please click here.
